1+1: Bullying gets better, but does it ever stop?

Welcome back to 1+1, Kate Carraway’s recurring column aimed at deconstructing the dynamics of every possible type of relationship. From mothers and daughters to doctors and patients, we’ll make you think twice about how you treat friends, lovers and colleagues. Today: bullies and their victims.

Context is everything, and that’s rarely more true than in the currently compelling case of bullies, their victims and the ways in which adults understand them. In author and advice columnist Dan Savage’s recent It Gets Better video-message project, for instance, gay teenagers are reassured their lives will, well, eventually “get better,” presumably once they leave their parents’ homes and their high schools and their small towns. Meanwhile, Lee Hirsch’s new film Bully follows three victimized children and the aftermath of two bullying victims’ suicides, a documentary that was predicated on Hirsch’s own history of being picked on.

The acute heartbreak of one child’s torment caught on tape in Hirsch’s film is especially affecting, but it’s not the whole story. What seems to be missing from the cultural conversation is how pervasive bullying is, even within the ostensibly mature confines of adulthood, and what kid-bullies have to do with their adult equivalents. The more immediate concerns of convincing parents, teachers and administrators to take bullying seriously, and beleaguered children and teens that they’re not alone, are paramount to making this cultural moment happen — but leaving out what happens next (and why it happens at all) is a missed opportunity. A bully and his or her victim are in an abusive relationship of power and control that will be played out over and over again, if more subtly, at work, in marriage and even in friendships.

The relationship between a bully and his or her victim is mostly misunderstood to be finite, but this only really bears out in the horrific cases when a bullied kid commits suicide. In the various, growing responses to bullying — which is either an “epidemic” further exacerbated by the anonymity of the Web and cellphones, or just more of the same, but writ larger by a culture of litigious and low-flying helicopter parents — there is a justifiable habit of drawing lines, creating groups of who is being hurt and who is doing the hurting.

Patrice Samara, an author and the director of development and innovation for the group Alphabet Kids (the organization’s mission is “tolerance and understanding from the start”) says, “It appears that at least 20% to 40% [of children] have been bullied.” Although it’s easy and fair to just hate, vilify and dismiss a kid who bullies, it’s not particularly useful; they were probably bullied, too.

In Hirsch’s acclaimed doc, which continues to expand to theatres across Canada, a school bully is never interviewed, which is strange for a feature-length film called Bully. Perhaps it would be too much for a child and their parent to agree to. While victims typically remain the focus of the discussion, bullies become rarefied and almost invisible in the margins of this phenomenon, even though they surely need as much help as their victims. What compels a child-bully is what compels a lot of negative, anti-social adolescent and adult behaviour: standard-issue abuse and neglect (and, in some cases, unchecked health and development problems).

“All activities that happen with children emanate from what’s around them, whether its their parents or relatives or educators,” Samara says. “We say ‘It takes a village.’ One reflects the type of behaviour that is being seen in their closest circle.”

This might include households where physical, verbal or emotional intimidation is normal. “In some communities, being ‘strong’ or ‘macho’ is very much condoned,” Samara adds. For a child who is bullied, or bullies, the cycle continues “throughout the lifetime of an adult, and it comes in many shapes and forms.”

Dr. Stephanie Knarr, a U.S. marriage and family psychotherapist who specializes in anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder, says the effects of being bullied can create, as they say, a monster. Victims sometimes demonstrate “symptoms of panic disorder, panic attacks and difficulty being around other people. That’s one extreme. Another is feeling very insecure about themselves, [which might] manifest in a more perpetrator, aggressive way.”

This has diffuse effects: An adult who was bullied as a kid might still be defensive and angry. If the abuse continues into high school and even university, the victim may stay silent forever. Like anything else — gossip, insecurity, cliques, other instances of power plays — intimidation and abuse may be more apparent in the lives of kids, but it’s endlessly present.